Factors Entering Into The Sexual Character

Description

Factors Entering Into The Sexual Character

That the physical processes taking place in the genitals are not exclusive factors in the formation of the psychosexual character, is proven by the fact that, notwithstanding an apparently healthful and normal development of these organs, a sexuality may result which is at once abnormal in intensity, and radically contrary to that of the sex to which the individual belongs; but that certain habits of mind, and conditions of body, are conducive to the development of contrary eexua) instinct is equally well proven by the prevalence of homosexuality in prisons, asylums, and other places of confinement, and by the addiction to the practice of those noted for idealistic speculation.

There can hardly be any doubt that the homosexual habits attributed to Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Commodus and Heliogabalus, men of undoubted ability, and great mental, if not moral strength, as well as those of Socrates, Sophocles, Pindar and others of the Greek and Latin poets and philosophers, arose from two widely different, but physiologically correlated, groups of causes, in which habits of mind—idealism or cruelty—played the most important part. The triplet of Dante— as well as the verses of Martial, and other Roman satirists, shows that the contrary sexual instinct of great literary characters was a fact of very early observation; while the strongly amorous sentiment of In Memariam, of Whitman's " Leaves of Grass," of Goethe, Moli^re, Montaigne, Alfieri Wink-elmann, Verlaine and Oscar Wilde, shows them all—some confessedly and others, perhaps, unconsciously—to have been radically inverted, although withheld by social restraint from that open and unreserved practice of homosexuality which characterized Michelangelo in Italy, Muret in France, and Socrates in ancient Greece.